I'd like to describe on how to make private servers (and online play) more attractive:
1. Private server settings GUI
User interface, where admin of the server can set which hills will be in the cup and which rules/settings will be used in that cup. This is possible today but the buyer of the server has to write to Jussi who has to manually edit the server.
EDIT: Also option to add some description of the private server would be nice....for example to add link to website or discord
2. Allow creation of teams
Teams or clans or whatever you name it. What I mean by this is that players from any mix of countries could form a team. NOTE: Not a 4 player team in team cup, just a team, like in real life, ski jumpers are also in teams like "SC Oberstdorf", "TJ Dukla Liberec" and so on. Then these teams could compete in private servers, where the owner can configure set of hills and settings that these teams agree on, maybe schedule a time for the cup and specify how many players of each team can compete. For example 2 teams can each nominate 5 jumpers, and they will participate in a cup and top 3 or top 5 of each hill will receive some points and based on this one team wins. I don't think we need all these functions implemented in the game, lot of this can be done by the community manually (like calculating the points after each hill etc.), but what would help a lot is if jumper can join or be invited to a team (team could be displayed in game with some prefix next to name).
I know there was lot of suggestion about team cups, but in the end it fails to be attractive, because if one team member disconnects from the game, the team may as well go home, because they cannot compete in 3 people only. But if you form a team outside of the cup and then play as individuals representing that team, then this is solved because you can still compete with less people (let's say only top3 is calculated and each time has 5 guys, then even if 2 drops, you can still win)
Lot of these concepts come from Trackmania games, where I remember in the past we used to do this all the time, Trackmania back then did not even offer any official team mode, we just added team prefix to our in-game nicknames and joined a private server, calculated results ourselves after each map. You can get creative in how the tournament looks like....is it 6 hills classic cup? Or maybe you can jump three times on each hills and discard the worst result? Possibilites are endless...
This in my opinion makes online play more attractive and therefore would generate more revenue from online keys and private server purchases.
Please consider
Best regards,
Michal